The Weight of a Moment: Stories of Choice, Sin, and Redemption - Softcover

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The Weight of a Moment: Stories of Choice, Sin, and Redemption

A single choice can redeem a life-or condemn it.

There comes a moment when character is no longer an abstraction.

A thief finds himself capable of mercy. A desperate man discovers the price of selfishness. A criminal is offered the possibility of another life. Others stand before temptation, vengeance, sacrifice, greed, and death-and choose.

The Weight of a Moment: Stories of Choice, Sin, and Redemption brings together tales by O. Henry, Anton Chekhov, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and other masters of the short story to explore the choices by which men and women reveal who they are.

Some turn back. Some refuse. Some discover that redemption may depend upon a single act of courage, while others learn that one selfish decision can set an entire life upon the road to ruin.

The anthology is arranged in pairs of moral counterpoints. Each pairing places two characters under a comparable moral pressure-responsibility and ignorance, brotherhood and greed, love and temptation, power and self-mastery, repentance and damnation, mercy and vengeance, or our obligations to others. The stories are not simple mirror images. Instead, reading them side by side allows the choices made in one story to throw those made in the other into sharper relief.

Spanning crime, tragedy, folklore, and the supernatural, these stories share a conviction both ancient and unsettling:

The smallest moment may carry the greatest moral weight.

Contents

1. "The Signal" - Vsevolod M. Garshin
2. "The Malefactor" - Anton Chekhov
3. "Makes the Whole World Kin" - O. Henry
4. "Just Meat" - Jack London
5. "A Retrieved Reformation" - O. Henry
6. "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" - Dashiell Hammett
7. "The Stone-Cutter" - Traditional Japanese Tale
8. "To Cast a Shadow" - Joe Castoro
9. "How Tajima Shumé Was Tormented by a Devil of His Own Creation" - Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
10. "The Spider's Thread" - Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
11. "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" - Leo Tolstoy
12. "Revenge" - Ambrose Bierce
13. "The Dead Girl and the Grave-Robber" - John Moschos, newly translated into English by Simone Di Benedetto, PhD
14. "Rashōmon" - Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

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